View source for How to release LDC

This document is intended for maintainers/release managers of the [[LDC]] project and describes the steps necessary to release a new version of LDC to the public.

First, a quick outline of the process. For more details, see the later sections.

* Establish consensus among the developers about the plan to release a new version. This will at least involve some discussion on the project mailing list.
* Make sure that Git mater is in a reasonably stable state, i.e. that at least all the CI tests at [https://travis-ci.org/ldc-developers/ldc Travis] and [http://ci.lycus.org ci.lycus.org] pass.
* Create a new Git branch called <tt>release-x.y.z</tt>, and announce this on the project mailing list. Git master is now open for development again.
* Make sure that LDC passes the extended set of release qualification tests (see below); if any failures are discovered, work on resolving them.
* Release a first beta version:
**Update the version information in <tt>dmd/mars.c</tt> and <tt>dmd2/mars.c</tt> (should be refactored out to a single location in CMake).
**Compile binary packages as described below.
**Create Git tags in the ldc (<tt>vX.Y.Z-beta1</tt>), druntime and Phobos (<tt>ldc-vX.Y.Z-beta1</tt>) repositories.
**Announce the beta version on the project forum, IRC (freenode) and digitalmars.D.announce.
*Repeat the last step until no more regressions compared to the last release are reported, then one last time for the final release.
*Update the package links on the wiki.
*Submit a pull request for the links at http://dlang.org/download.html.
*Announce the release on:
**digitalmars.d.announce
**digitalmars.d.ldc
**Google+ (https://plus.google.com/communities/100033468228217743303)
**IRC (#d/#ldc on freenode, update channel titles)
**Twitter (#dlang)

== Release qualification tests ==

* Make sure the code base passes the test suite (ctest -j<n>) in the follwing configurations:
** Linux x86
** Linux x86_64, multilib enabled
** OS X 10.7, multilib enabled
* Make sure that the different combinations of the ''BUILD_BC_LIBS'', ''BUILD_SHARED_LIBS'', and ''BUILD_SHARED_LIBS'' at least build and install on Linux/OS X (multilib on) as to not block further progress (''todo: post testing scripts to GitHub'').
* Make sure all the version numbers are up to date and LDMD has also been adapted to the new frontend version.

== Building binary packages ==

The Linux binary packages are built on the second-to-last Ubuntu LTS release for compatibility. An easy way to do this is to just choose from the [http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2 official Ubuntu Cloud Guest images] and run them on an Amazon EC2 instance (m1.small should be enough).

The scripts used for building the packages are part of the [https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc-scripts ldc-scripts] repository.

After the packages are done, be sure to smoke-test them by compiling a Hello World program in a clean environment.

[[Category:LDC]]